Got a few xtra bucks and looking for something to do in Toronto this Sunday evening? Well, it's time for the AIDS Committee of Toronto's (ACT) 10th annual SNAP! photographic fundraiser. It includes a live auction, silent auction and photo competition. It will be held at the National Ballet School, one of the niftiest venues in Toronto for this kind of event. ACT needs you.

Bogarde has been dead for years, but he became a huge star in the UK in the early 1940s. He was a prominent actor there as Western Europe recovered from World War II, entered the Cold War and the masses embraced television. He was a hot, creative man, and he was also a sister with an amazing moral compass.

I first laid eyes on Bogarde in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s 1996 documentary film, The Celluloid Closet. One of the films profiled in that doc is Bogarde’s 1961 film, Victim. In it Bogarde plays a handsome, successful married solicitor who becomes enmeshed in a blackmail scandal after a young male friend commits suicide. The film is about gay men living in the shadows, afraid of being outed, subject to all kinds of victimization because gay sex is criminal and taboo.

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Dum-dum-daaaa! C'mon, give it a chance, it was a different time.

Victim is a complicated story in which all is not as it initially seems. It is one of earliest mass-market films that refers openly and directly to homosexuality. And it changed social mores in the UK, contributing partly to the success of the movement to decriminalize gay sex in that country and opening the way for the same here in Canada.

The DVD release of Victim includes a 1961 press interview Bogarde gave about the film and his life. It’s fascinating.